Psychological safety: Model fallibility

The job of leadership is to harness the efforts of others to achieve great things, and that can only be done when others are willing to follow. There are three things that you have to be aware of if you really want others to be vulnerable and willing to follow. Number one, you have to go first. If you want other people to be vulnerable, you've got to be vulnerable. Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, says if we as leaders want other people to talk about their mistakes, we've got to talk about ours first. You got to set that example. Eileen Fisher, who was the founder and CEO of a very successful clothing line and retail company, calls herself a don't knower. As the CEO, she leads her senior team often with that opening line like, I don't know. What do you see? What do you think? Being a don't knower is very good advice. And of course, that's modeling a little bit of vulnerability as well. The third thing that leaders have to do is evident in a fabulous story about Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. Eight months into his tenure as CEO, Nadella gave a talk at the Grace Hopper Conference, which is a big conference for women in tech, and asked a question at the end of his keynote about pay inequities between women and men. He answered it in an astonishingly problematic way. He said, essentially, be patient, and over the long run, these things will work themselves out. This answer created an absolute firestorm of anger and frustration, and even the conclusion that Nadella's explicit views about valuing diversity and inclusion were just a line, weren't real. It would have been easy in his shoes to just wait for the steam to blow off. The key to this story, to me, is owning it. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it, own it, learn from it publicly. That creates so much psychological safety that gives other people permission to do the same.